> The intellectual context Althusser wrote in is really important - he
> was making his theoretical arguments against what he saw to be
> Second and Third International vulgarisations of historical
> materialism - i.e., 'base and superstructure', 'forces and relations
> of production', economic determinism and all that stuff. He wanted a
> more subtle, more complex theory, and importantly, one that was not
> deterministic - this is the man, after all, who would eventually
> coin the term 'aleatory materialism'. In many ways his project
> resonated with the Anglo New Left critiques of vulgar marxism.
> Ironically, he was eventually pegged by Thompson as the opposite,
> the highest, theoretically consistent stage of vulgar marxism itself
> (or, by Thompson's definition, 'Stalinism'). This happened partly
> because in travelling into UK debates some of the context of his
> writing was lost, and words changed their meanings. If Althusser's
> targets had been Thompson and others in the British New Left, he
> would have made, or emphasised, quite different points - but his
> targets were other PCF philosophers.
> (This, incidentally, is one of Althusser's key points in Reading
> Capital: theoretical and scientific writings should be understood as
> determined partially by context, including not only what the writer
> says and how they say it, but what they don't say, because it is
> either taken for granted or considered irrelevant, but which might
> actually be emphasised if the writer had been engaged by different
> interlocutors. So to really understand a theory - which is separable
> from the author - is to understand how it might take form in other
> contexts, not the ability to quote lengthy passages.)
>
> Dealing with the three Althusserian bugbears:
>
> Althusser's 'structuralism' is not the determination of reality by
> some essence or whole. It is actually an anti-holism, a portrayal of
> society as composed of structures of quite different types, which
> interrelate in complex ways. The structures are not seen as external
> to one another - for example, the economy depends on aspects of the
> state (e.g. property law) and vice versa - but they are 'relatively
> autonomous'. He didn't get much further than asserting this - he had
> very little to say about the form of the structures or how they
> interrelate (except perhaps in 'Ideological State Apparatuses'), he
> mainly wanted to say that society was not fully determined by the
> economy (except 'in the last instance', whatever that means). He did
> propose four basic structural ensembles: economy, state, ideology
> and theory - which shows the diversity of what he thought of as
> structures - though they are clearly pretty questionable. Personally
> I would work with a much greater number of structures and sub-
> structures.
>
> His 'anti-historicism' is not at all 'anti-history'. It is related
> to the structuralism - the argument is against a unitary historical
> narrative, a theory of history as a whole. Different structures work
> in utterly different ways, and thus develop at utterly different
> paces. But they are interdependent, so developments in one sphere
> have effects (external and internal) on the other spheres.
> 'Contradictions' play out as tensions between or within structures,
> and often tensions within a structure generated by changes in other
> structures which it depends on. Proper history records as 'events'
> changes in structures and their interrelation.
>
> His 'anti-humanism' is not 'anti-human'. Its immediate target was
> the 'humanist Marxism' based on the 1844 Manuscripts, etc., that
> portrayed history anthropologically as the unfolding of human
> potential (i.e. Ted's Marx), and/or emphasised 'agency' as something
> magically other to structures. It is not to dismiss subjectivity,
> but to emphasise that subjectivity itself is socially constructed.
> That is, not only do we make history in circumstances not of our own
> choosing, but we interpret society with frames of reference not of
> our own choosing. Structures are reproduced through human activity,
> but often not as the intended consequences of human agency, and
> society is riven by structural contradictions that do not
> necessarily align with individuals' conceptions.
>
The problem with Althusser's "determinism" isn't that it has no logical space for "indeterminism"; it's that it, like all forms of the "materialism" it misidentifies with "science," has no logical space for the deteminants constitutive of "human" activity. Specifically, it has no logical space for self-determination and final causation, the final form of these, in Marx's "humanist" understanding of them and their historical development, being the determination of activity by "self-conscious reason." This means ironically that they have no logical space for the human activity that is "science."
Marx's "essentialism" has nothing to do with "holism." It's "individualist" in the sense that the only entities to which agency and the realization of value can reasonably be attributed are "individuals." The "essence" of the individual, however, is conceived as "relational," in the sense that, as in the 6th and 7th theses on Feuerbach, it's conceived as the outcome of its relations which, understood in this way, are "internal relations."
The "essence" of human individuals is their potential to actualize "self-conscious reason." The realization of this essence requires a specific set of internal social relations - those that define "communism." These are themselves the creation of history understood as a set of internally related "educational" "stages in the development of the human mind," i.e. in the development of "self- conscious reason."
"Education" in this sense occurs through "self-estrangement" within the "economic structure," specifically within the internal relations that constitute the "labour process." Interpreted in this way, "relations of production" in their successive forms are "schools" within which individual development occurs. "Forces of production" are objectifications of "mind," of "reason," and their development therefore expresses the development of "mind," of "reason." Each particular form of "self-estrangement" is, for this reason, self- transcending.
Other expressions of the development of mind, e.g. philosophy and art, are "superstructural" because they are conditioned by the development of mind made possible by "education" within the "economic structure" which is therefore "basic."
The following claims:
> theoretical and scientific writings should be understood as
> determined partially by context, including not only what the writer
> says and how they say it, but what they don't say, because it is
> either taken for granted or considered irrelevant, but which might
> actually be emphasised if the writer had been engaged by different
> interlocutors. So to really understand a theory - which is separable
> from the author - is to understand how it might take form in other
> contexts, not the ability to quote lengthy passages.
>
> we interpret society with frames of reference not of our own
> choosing. Structures are reproduced through human activity, but
> often not as the intended consequences of human agency, and society
> is riven by structural contradictions that do not necessarily align
> with individuals' conceptions.
>
assume what they explicitly deny, i.e. that these claims don't apply to the "theoretical and scientific writings" of Althusser and to his own "frames of reference."
Ted